The King’s Shield

It’s time for another story from the archives, and this is a bigger one. Oddly enough, though it clocks it at more than 6000 words, which is about as big as my short stories get before they balloon past the 10,000 word mark, I have done little with this one.

Back when I dug up “The All-Seeing Prophet of Fortune and Love” for all y’all I introduced my high school Final Fantasy-esque story world Twilight Dawn. This story, “The King’s Shield,” takes place in the same world. Just as “The All-Seeing Prophet” was a sort of prologue written about Oscar and Otaka, two of the main characters of the RPG I was working on at the time, “The King’s Shield” was a prologue for Vitram Regol, an old knight of the Western Alliance.

It’s a story of war and a crisis of faith. The thing that remained with me most as I look back on it is the final scene, which still resonates with me.

So here it is, “The King’s Shield.” Enjoy!

Download–>The King’s Shield by Nick Hayden